Steve Rabey, Religion News Service

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White Male Leadership Persists at Evangelical Ministries

Development Associates International President/CEO Jane Overstreet, right, participates in a Servant Leadership workshop in Juba, South Sudan, on March 19, 2013. Photo courtesy of Caleb Overstreet via Development Associates International

While America’s population is becoming less white and while gender diversity is transforming workplaces, white male leadership persists at most evangelical parachurch organizations — the thousands of nonprofit businesses that carry out various kinds of Christian ministry.

Only one of 33 major national organizations contacted for this article is led by a woman — Jane Overstreet at Development Associates International. And only three are led by nonwhite males.

Evangelicals: We Don't Have All the Answers

In the early 1990s, the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family raised the ire of LGBT groups by backing Colorado’s Amendment 2, a measure — ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court — that would have allowed local governments to discriminate against gays.

A quarter-century later, that episode was history as Focus President Jim Daly and gay activist Ted Trimpa sat down together to celebrate their friendship and more recent collaboration on sex trafficking laws at an evangelical conference in Denver called Q, which stands for questions.

'A Purpose to Everything Under the Sun, Including Marijuana'

Jackson, who said her Christian faith is everything to her (it’s “the pie, not a piece of pie,” she said), talked to her minister as she wrestled with the morality of marijuana. “I’m a byproduct of the 1980s and ‘Just Say No,’ so I grew up thinking this was evil,” she said. Stacey Mobley, minister of the church of Christ of Colorado Springs, an independent, Bible-based congregation, said members support Jackson’s work.

“God made the plant, and said in Genesis 1:31 that everything he made was very good,” said Mobley, who opposes recreational marijuana.